Parental Ethnotheories, Social Practice and the Culture-Specific Development of Social Smiling in Infants

Abstract

In this article we argue that current theories on socioemotional development during infancy need to be reconceptualized in order to account for cross-cultural variation in caregiver–infant interaction. In line with the cultural-historical internalization theory of emotional development (Holodynski & Friedlmeier, 2006) and the ecocultural model of development (Keller & Kärtner, 2013), we argue that socioemotional development can be understood only in the context of social practice and underlying ethnotheories that give significance to infants' emotional expressions. Thus, culture-specific interpretations of and expectations concerning infants' expressive cues lead to culture-specific interactional routines. These, in turn, lead to culture-specific usage of these expressions by the developing child. To develop our argument, we focus on a specific aspect of early socioemotional development, namely, the emergence of social smiling during infancy. Interactional dynamics in autonomous cultural milieus are based on specific ethnotheories, most prominently that positive emotional exchange during face-to-face interaction is one of the most desirable ways of interacting with infants. However, the dominant ethnotheories concerning emotional development and their associated behavioral routines vary systematically across cultural milieus and are markedly different in prototypically relational cultural milieus, in which they center on infants' contentment. This has implications for infants' emotional expressivity and, possibly, experience.